background
The Brittany region is a community that has continued to grow since decentralization in the 1980s. It went from a budget of 175 million euros in 1987 to 1.6 billion euros in 2017. Its main budgetary items are education, continuing training, transport, innovation and tourism.
With an annual budget of 4 million euros, the DSI manages 53 agents to ensure the daily functioning of the region. In a customer-oriented quality approach, process organization and continuous improvement, the IT department must consider an IS control strategy to ensure: technicality, innovation, industrialization and productivity.
In recent years, the Brittany Region has made the choice to switch to “Low Code” development for its management applications. With a dozen applications in production now, we are fully satisfied: we have gained in agility, in TTM, in maintainability. No need to use JEE development “from scratch” anymore, except for very specific needs. We opted for self-hosting, and particularly appreciate the ease of integration into the Simplicité information system: understandable data model, relational storage, REST API, identity management connectors...
Benjamin Buffereau
Head of the development division, Brittany Regional Council
Challenges
In this context, the IT department of the Brittany region brings together more than 17 customer departments, 141 support devices, 130 applications and 70 project requests per year. It also manages more than 30 sites and high schools, 1600 computers, 500 telephones and 23,000 support calls per year.
In fact, the challenges are numerous: to meet the requirements of requests, to ensure the maintenance of applications, to ensure support,... With a heterogeneous application park, aging technologies used (Flex), it is necessary to reinvent the wheel and train accordingly over 2-year cycles.
To meet them, it is necessary to choose a tool that makes it possible to create applications homogeneously, quickly and at a lower cost according to the needs expressed by agents and users.
Objectives
— Control of the information system as a strategic asset (for the DSI Competence place where production is organized).
— Industrialization on requests and projects.
— Reduce as much as possible the technical debt of applications developed with old technologies.
— Accelerate the number of applications developed while maintaining a strong control of costs.
Solutions
Plus de réactivité et de productivité.
Maintainability, shared functionalities, reliability.
Differently: agility/Implementation, jobs better associated with development.
Maturity and adaptability
By 2025, almost three quarters of new applications developed by companies will use low-code (compared to 25% in 2020). Source Forester
